Travis Ross & Jared Lorince on social psych in interactive environments

Travis Ross, a graduate student in IU’s department of Telecommunications spoke to an audience of students and faculty today about his research on how social norms influence people in games. He says this approach is important because game designers often do not think in terms of social norms. He asks whether game designers can use social norms in their game designs to influence gamer behavior. Perhaps social norms could influence gamers to behave prosocially and enable game designers to increase their profit on their games.

Jared Lorince, a graduage student in the Cognitive Science department, also presented his work on information seeking behaviors. He asks whether the foraging seeking behavior of animals might inform the ways in which we search for information online. He says that especially exploratory search, where people don’t have one thing they’re looking for, can be informed by this type of research. The aggregation of people’s trajectories through the search space can help inform individuals as they set out on exploratory searches.

Katherine Sender (U Penn) & Brenda Weber (IU)

Katherine Sender, a professor at Penn, visited IU’s Department of Telecommunication today to discuss her new book, The Big Reveal: Makeover Television, Audiences, and the Promise of Transformation. Her work focuses on makeover television shows like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and What Not to Wear. She says, a true inner self is a concept that is at the heart of an audience analysis of these shows. Being reflexive and recognizing who this inner self is is important to the process of producing ourselves in an “authentic” fashion, Sender says.

Brenda Weber joined professor Sender in discussing her new book, Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship, and Celebrity. She suggests that Pimp my Ride has as much gender in it as What Not to Wear. She rejects the notion that makeover shows are simply toxic cultural wastelands. Instead she says they are worthy of in depth analysis because they are “smart, banal & hurtful and lots of interesting elements are built into them.”

Weber suggests that the makeover expresses anxiety about the lack of selfhood. She says there is deep anxiety on a larger social level about the ambiguity of self. The self, she says, is our greatest economic asset. If we make poor choices about the self, we may harm our earning potential. Makeover shows lead us to believe that we have to harness our selves so that we can compete through global networks.

Thoughts on Socio-Technical Structures and Ethics

Last week, I came across an article which reported on the fact that Google regularly receives requests from the US government to remove information from the Internet and complies with their requests most of the time. In particular, they recently asked Google to remove embarrassing videos from YouTube portraying police brutality on the Occupy protesters in Oakland, California.

For a generally optimistic young media studies grad student, this news was incredibly disheartening. Actually, to a person with even a small semblance of morals, this probably should be disheartening. We have been taught to think that in our new new media world, we all have a voice and can express it through tweets, Facebook posts, blog entries, photos and videos. This report suggests that this is all just an illusion.

It also shows how closely the government and corporate media giants work together. It illustrates perfectly the trouble everyday people face when the government and those who create social reality (See Colbert on Wikiality) in today’s world are in cahoots. Though, there is danger in the serious concentration of media ownership and political power in society today, the ubiquity of cameras and new media technologies and the decentered structure of the Internet, allow us to observe these abuses of power like never before.

Events like these, where the objectives of governments and corporations clash with those of freedom seekers and libertarians, offer social analysts an interesting place to focus their observations. Because of the nature of our communication tools today, sociology, I think, becomes easier. We see social structures and individual and institutional motivations more clearly fixed in various configurations of content, people, technologies and actions.

Last Friday I attended a symposium on digital ethics and policy at Loyola University Chicago where exactly this topic was explored by a number of really innovative and insightful scholars and media practitioners. Leading the charge was opening keynote speaker, New York Times best-selling author and game designer, Jane McGonigal. In her presentation, she suggested that games should empower their players. She described her game Evoke which gave its players, who were mostly, young people in South Africa, an opportunity to make positive changes in their (mostly offline) communities as well as build a professional portfolio (resume) for themselves while they’re competing and having fun playing a game. Many of the players started businesses as a result of their involvement in the game. Her talk, along with others I heard there, restored some of my hope in the state of our socio-technical world.

Another really thought-provoking speaker, Julian Dibbell described two general socio-technical structures: one authoritarian (imagine Facebook where a designer like Mark Zuckerberg sends down software and rules of engagement to users from on high) the other federalist (the users each own their own part of the structure and make their own rules). His argument was that the concentration of power in authoritarian structures is problematic because a certain ideology and moral (or lack thereof) considerations are forced onto the users. In an egalitarian system, each user is in control of his or her own portion of the system. This is generally, a very humanist proposal. However, because many people do not have the skills, know-how and/or motivation to maintain their part of the system, in many cases this solution has pitfalls too. Dibbell’s lecture really made me think though and ultimately, it occurred to me that there might be a socio-economic lesson to take from his enthusiasm for the egalitarian, federalist approach. It seems to me that it is very useful to identify these two kinds of structures but that solutions to many complex socio-technial issues require a layering of these two approaches.

Though this is certainly a multi-faceted problem, let’s take the current jobs and economic crisis as an example. The creation of more jobs might occur if government were to help decenter certain areas of industry like energy production (solar, wind, etc.) and farming (local growers & markets). Though, it would take a strong central government to make these decisions and put these ideas into effect, it would I think make better economic and humanitarian sense. This solution is obviously a complicated and a multi-layered one. We can’t think in terms of one kind of structure being better than another. Both may be necessary to achieve the changes our society needs.

What is clear in these examples, is that the individual morals and ethics of powerful individuals are at the heart of making decisions like these. Today more than ever one’s individual ethics and morals are visible for the world to see, though they have always driven such social and institutional decisions. Perhaps, it was naïve of me to be disheartened when I learned that the government censors the Internet. Perhaps it’s even more naïve of me to have hope that those in power aim to improve lives other than their own. But in some sense I do and I hope they will- whether by force due to the ubiquitous and open nature of media today or just because it’s the right thing to do.

Paul Wright: “U.S. males and pornography, 1973-2010: Consumption, predictors, correlates

Today in IU’s Department of Telecommunications brownbag series, new professor, Paul Wright discussed his work on males and pornography. Driving his inquiry were questions about whether there has been an increase in % of adult male consumers over time, whether there are reliable demographic predictors for pornography consumption, and whether consumption is correlated with attitudes/behaviors of concern to conservative moralists and/or public health officials?

He noted that historically there have been three perspectives on pornography in the academic literature: libertarian, moralist and feminist. Today there is also a public health perspective which is concerned about the transmission of STIs and unplanned pregnancies. Most of the literature on the soccializing effects of pornography comes from the libertarian and feminist perspectives. There is relatively little from the moralist or public health perspectives.Wright’s work seeks to help fill this void.

Using General Social Survey data Wright asked whether certain demographic and personal identifying variables, help to predict whether males will be more likely to emulate (or learn) behaviors observed in pornography. Theory suggests that there is a general socializing effect of pornograpy.

Wright reports a .3% increase in pornography consumption from 1973 to 2010. Pornography consumption over time, according to GSS data, has remained fairly constant. Religious people view less porn than non-religous, non-whites consume more (though barely more) porn than whites, education today is not a predictor of pornography consumption, according to Writght.

Males who consume pornography, were more likely to use condoms, engage in paid sex behavior, approve of adult premarital and teenage sex, and approve of extramarital sex.

Billionaire Steve Jobs, an Inspiration to the Occupy Wall Street Campaign?

Note:  This is a post I originally wrote for socialinformaticsblog.com on October 12, 2011.

A week ago we lost a leader in the field of social informatics. Though Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs was not a scholar, he was keenly aware of how important people, their desires and mental frameworks were to the design of computer technologies. In the design process he consistently resisted collaborators who designed with code and machinery in mind instead of actual, human users. Like most social informaticians, he called for design principles to reflect culture and make communication, work and entertainment more efficient, intuitive and beautiful.

His passing happened at an interesting economic and cultural moment as so many people today are out of work (some might even argue that this is due to the success of technology developers like Apple and Steve Jobs) and political tensions have never been higher. A growing number of activists who lament the US government’s apathy toward wealthy corporate entities has emerged also in recent weeks. In just under four weeks, the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) campaign has quickly spread all over the country and has observers around the world taking note.

In the OWS protesters’ mission statement, they say, we organize “at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments.” Their efforts are to express animosity toward corporate greed and the US government’s apathy toward this greed. Furthermore, they feel the government should be more active in correcting this problem. Namely, they call for the taxing of the richest one percent of the population so that the other ninety-nine percent might face less financial uncertainty.

Protester’s Mourn Jobs’ Passing

It occurs to me that the passing of Steve Jobs and the emergence of the OWS campaign intersect in an interesting way. Jobs, worth about 7 billion dollars, was undoubtedly in the one percent of people the protesters are asking the government to tax. In spite of this, many groups of protesters took time away from the protests to mourn his passing. A tweet from Twitter account @OPWallStreet on the night of his death said, “Sad to announce the death of Steve Jobs.”

While some may see this as an inconsistency in the message of the OWS, perhaps noting the genealogy of certain core values of the OWS campaign will help illuminate why OWS protesters, and so many others, feel a sense of grief at Jobs’ passing. Jobs was not just an innovator of technical artifacts. In many ways he also created new ways for communication to occur, new ways for entertainment to happen, new ways to work, to travel, to fall in love, etc.

One can easily trace the ideology and socio-technical structure that the OWS relies upon to share information and establish their movement back to innovators like Steve Jobs.   First, Jobs is a product of the sixties. He was a flower child and hung out with anti-war protesters and activists while he was beginning to develop his desire to work with computers. This influence impacted the design of Apple technologies and made past and present underdogs fall in love with him. In the world of conservative tech companies, Jobs was almost always on the lunatic fringe. He fought for the things his artistic, and humanistic intuition told him were right. OWS protesters see themselves in Jobs’ shoes: They are fighting against the status quo in an effort to put the human back in the center of the system’s design.

Second, Jobs developed technologies that were networked. His masterpieces the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, etc. are windows into the social world. Social informaticians know that these technologies bear a certain internal structure which predetermines a certain kind of use, requires certain skills, etc. The structure of a computer network is at the heart of both the OWS campaign and Jobs’ most influential Apple technologies. As information is exchanged, the OWS campaign is replicated across the country. It’s copied and pasted. A new instance emerges in a new location because people have seen pictures of others, read stories, watch videos and are inspired by others through their iPhones & iPads. The OWS information structure, which is the heart of the movement, is itself an instance of the computer network Steve Jobs envisioned in the design of his most influential Apple technologies.

The protesters aim to upset the government’s apathy. They, like Jobs, suggest that the system should reflect today’s socio-technical culture and empower users by giving them more tools to make life easier and more beautiful.

Nicky Lewis & Evan L. Frederick Talk Virtual Sports in IU Dept. of Telecom

IU Telecommunications graduate student Nicky Lewis discussed her masters thesis today on fantasy sports in the department’s brown bag seminar series.  In her talk she said that the number of fantasy sports players is the same as the popluation of Texas. She said, “Fantasy Football is the Dungeons and Dragons for guys who used to beat up the kids who played Dungeons and Dragons.” In her study she asked questions about what motivates people to play fantasy sports. She noted that traits like extraversion, competitiveness, Machiavellianism, sensation-seeking and impulsiveness impact one’s level of participation in fantasy sports. She also noted that people are motivated to play fantasy sports for social reasons, competitive reasons, social-identification and financial gain. Her study involved doing a survey of 457 people. 177 of those participated in fantasy football. She found that fantasy football players are more competitive and less impulsive than those who did not play.

Evan L. Frederick presented his work on Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) blogging. He found that most MMA blog users were male, white and had at least a college degree. Blogs were used to find information about fighters and fights that they couldn’t get elsewhere. One of the major reasons for consuming this content is to feel associated with a particular group (athletes and fans). Users also reported using blogs to engage in conversations with others in the group. If one considers MMA to be a niche sport, Evan suggests that MMA blog users could be similar to those of other niche sports in that users go to blogs in order to get information about the sport and athletes since it does not receive much traditional mass media coverage.

Erick Janssen visits IU’s Department of Telecommunications

In Erick Janssen’s brown bag discussion in the Department of Telecommunications today he introduced the Kinsey Institute to our band of communications and media scholars and students. Located in Morrison Hall on the Bloomington campus, the Kinsey Institute is an international center for the study of human sex and sexuality.

According to Janssen, there is a still void in academic research when it comes to work on emotions and sexual arousal. This, Janssen says has more to do with culture than it does science. He says the Kinsey Institute’s grants have been voted on and debated in Congress many times. It is a challenge to maintain funding and convince politicians and administrators that sex research is important, Janssen says. Part of his job is knowing how to negotiate doing research and pleasing the NIH. He says, if you put the phrase ‘sexual arousal’ in a grant title, you will not get funded by the NIH. NSF has also told him that they are not that interested in sexual arousal research. He has had to figure out how to still do his work while also maintaining a favorable relationship with these governmental entities. Janssen says that in his experience this is a particularly American problem as he did not have face this challenge in his work in the Netherlands.

Interestingly, Janssen has noticed that the pornography that they often use as stimuli in research studies has had increasingly weaker affects on the sexual arousal of research subjects over the past 15-2-0 years. He says researchers do not yet understand why this is the case. It may be that the context surrounding the sexual experience is becoming more arousing to research subjects (often undergraduates).

Graduate student Lelia Samson also discussed her research at the Kinsey Institiute and informed the group that there are funding opportunites for graduate students who are interested in doing interdiciplinary research on sex at IU.

Henry Jenkins and Mimi Ito Visit IU

Last Friday we graduate students in IU’s Department of Telecommunications were spoiled as famous media scholars Henry Jenkins and Mimi Ito treated us to one of the most amazing brownbag discussions I’ve witnessed. Though they had events planned across campus all day, including individual talks in the afternoon, they sat together in the morning in front of a packed room full of undergraduates, graduate students, faculty and even some staff members and discussed the series of events leading them to accomplish the professional successes both of them have had. Both Mimi and Henry are self-described outsiders in various institutions they’ve worked in in the past and enjoy the freedom that they have now to do work without worrying much about pressures that institutional or diciplinary forces can often apply. They cautioned us though, suggesting that the path they took is not necessarily for everyone. Ito, especially, offered great advice stating that when you go outside of the safety of the usual academic professional trajectory, you must be very careful to maintain professional relationships. They are what sustains you, she says. She pointed to the importance of building a solid, widespread and diverse professional social network. Ito also advised us to be helpful and participate in conversations where you have something to add. Being nice to people is important, according to Jenkins, especially when you’re making public comments.

In short, hearing about their careers and philosophies about managing life and work pressures was reinvigorating. They are both surprisingly down to earth, helpful and it was easy to see from them that they are just being themselves, doing what they love to do and doing it very, very well.

IU Telecom Grad Student Research Talks – 09.16.11

Today IU Department of Telecommunications graduate student, Soyoung Bae described her research on selection of news articles. Her work shows that online news stories that were more threatening than innocuous were selected more often and news stories with photos were selected more often than those without photos. She says that this work builds on theories that suggest that humans are biologically predisposed to examine their surroundings to become aware of potential threats.

In a second presentation Sung Wook Ji described his work on the deployment of IPTV in low and high income areas. Interestingly, in Indiana, since 2006, AT&T has overwhelmingly built out its IPTV infrastructure in high income areas over low income areas. This encourages competition (and lower rates) among video service providers in these wealthier areas even though there are fewer people living in these areas.

Media Industry Economics

Today professor David Waterman from Indiana University’s department of Telecommunications presented research which illustrates a confusing phenomenon occuring in the media industry. A professor of media industry economics, he showed that the total revenue for the media industry in the United States is declining while consumption of media products is increasing. He said that there is an increase in online advertising which helps offset the decline in advertising in other areas of the media industry but this online increase is too small to make up the difference in the decline in traditional advertising revenue. He suggests that the media industry is shrinking in terms of revenue but not necessarily in terms of production and/or employment. This coupled with the fact that media use is on the rise, creates a confusing picture for analysts trying to make sense of the media industry today. As audience member professor Harmeet Sawhney suggested during the Q & A, it is possible that the category system (news, radio, television b/casting, DBS/sattelite, cable, recorded music, video games, etc.) used to collect revenue and employment data are no longer adequeate for understanding the fractured and independent nature of media work and production today. While I find professor Waterman’s study very insightful and enlightening, I think an additional study which might help account for the unkown arenas where work (even free labor) is done in the media economy. This additional step may help us to understand the larger picture more completely. It seems it is in these unknown arenas where it might be possible to shed light on the confusing situation professor Waterman has uncovered in his impressive research.